The One You Feed - A Conversation With Dean Sluyter

Any effort to create a non-agitated state of mind is itself a form of agitation.

Welcome to The One You Feed.

Throughout time,

Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.

Quotes like,

Garbage in,

Garbage out,

Or you are what you think ring true.

And yet,

For many of us,

Our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity,

Self-pity,

Jealousy,

Or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter.

It takes conscious,

Consistent,

And creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction.

How they feed their good wolf.

Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Dean Slider,

An award-winning author who has taught meditation and awakening since 1970.

Dean leads workshops,

Talks,

And retreats throughout the U.

S.

And beyond,

And has been featured in the New York Times,

USA Today,

InStyle,

New York Magazine,

O,

The Oprah Magazine,

And many others.

He is also on the faculty of the West Coast Writers' Conferences.

On this episode,

Eric and Dean discuss his book,

Fear Less,

Living Beyond Fear,

Anxiety,

Anger,

And Addiction.

Hi,

Dean.

Welcome to the show.

Hi,

Eric.

It's great to be here.

It's a pleasure to have you on.

Your book is called Fear Less,

Living Beyond Fear,

Anxiety,

Anger,

And Addiction.

We will go into all that here in a moment,

But let's start like we normally do with the parable.

There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter,

And he says,

In life,

There are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf,

Which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,

And the other is a bad wolf,

Which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

The granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second,

And she looks up at her grandfather and she says,

Well,

Grandfather,

Which one wins?

The grandfather says,

The one you feed.

I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Well,

It's a very powerful story.

I can see why you've used this as the central metaphor for your program here,

So many levels to it.

I want to go straight to a neurological level.

We could,

Approximately,

We can identify the aggressive wolf with the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system,

And that's the branch of the nervous system,

Which when it's activated,

Stimulates the fight or flight response.

Whatever stimulus is out there,

We feel,

Okay,

I have to deal with this in a fearful way,

Get the heck out of here,

Flight,

Or I have to deal with it in an aggressive way,

Fight.

Now,

We need that response.

We've got caveman,

Cavewoman nervous system still,

But unfortunately,

In modern life,

Every time the garbage truck goes by and you hear that roar,

Our cave person nervous system interprets that as,

Oh,

There's the saber-toothed tiger,

So our sympathetic nervous system,

Our fight or flight response,

Tends to kick in inappropriately.

The way we balance it,

The good wolf,

So to speak,

Is the parasympathetic system,

And that's the branch of the nervous system that does just the opposite,

Gets us cooled out,

Gets us settled into the boundless okayness of this moment as it is,

The fact that from a bigger perspective that we don't have to panic,

We don't have to run,

We don't have to take arms against what's going on,

We can be in harmony with it.

That parasympathetic system,

That good wolf,

Is the one that we feed through meditative methods.

Physiologically,

Meditative methods activate the parasympathetic system and tend to switch off the sympathetic system.

That's a great way for us to go into this.

Very early in your book,

You describe that the book is essentially going to focus on two things.

One is practice,

So some of the meditation practices that we can do,

And then view,

Which is sort of a way of looking at the world.

We're going to spend a fair amount of time on practice,

I think,

But I thought let's start with view.

Let's talk about,

From your perspective,

What is right view and how does it relate to specifically having less fear in our lives?

Right view,

And we want to be clear here,

By view we don't mean view in the sense of opinion.

By view we mean it quite literally,

Seeing what's in front of you.

That's what right view is.

Right view is seeing actual reality rather than our thoughts about it or our feelings about it.

I think of reality as being what is laid out in front of us in each moment,

And then all our thoughts and concepts are like a piece of tracing paper we've laid over it and that we've drawn all kinds of stuff and made all kinds of notes and so forth.

We're always seeing reality filtered through all of that.

A wonderful example is from the Steven Spielberg film in 2015,

Bridge of Spies.

I cite this.

I have a chapter about this in the book actually titled Would It Help?

Based on the true story of Rudolph Abel,

A Soviet spy captured in New York at the height of the Cold War,

And he's now on trial for his life,

And the Russians and the Americans,

Everyone wants him dead because he's a very inconvenient person.

His lawyer comes in and explains all this to him.

Fortunately,

His lawyer is Tom Hanks,

So probably things will turn out okay.

It's a tip-off in any movie.

That's right.

That's right.

You want Tom on your team.

So Tom explains to him the dire straits that he's in,

And the spy who's played by the wonderful Mark Rylance won an Oscar for this role actually,

And he digests this information for a moment,

And then he says,

All right,

And Hanks says,

You don't seem worried,

And he shrugs a little.

He says,

Would it help?

That's the best thing in the film.

Actually when Mark Rylance walks,

When people spot him on the streets,

They say,

Hey Mark,

Would it help?

That cuts through so much confusion.

I grew up in a very political family,

And I can remember my parents screaming at the TV news,

God damn Richard Nixon.

Even then I used to wonder,

Do they know Nixon can't hear them through the TV screen?

So in this case,

One aspect of view is just seeing that that doesn't help,

And that it's actually very,

Right view is always liberating.

Right view is always liberating.

When you see that that doesn't help,

You realize,

Oh,

I can stop doing that.

I don't have to cultivate stopping that.

I don't have to try to push down my emotions.

I just let that go.

I mean,

A very similar thing,

Everyday experience,

Is sitting at the red light,

And you're in a hurry,

And you tighten your grip on the steering wheel,

You're kind of straining forward in the seat as you mentally try to make the red light turn green faster.

We've all done that.

Now,

Does it help?

No.

And the extremely good news here,

And again,

This is a matter of view,

Is realizing that it never has helped.

It will never help.

You can just invest hundreds of man hours or woman hours for the rest of your life in trying to make the red light turn green faster.

It never will.

Now,

Think of all the other kinds of red lights in your life,

The things that other people do when you're going,

No,

No,

Don't say that,

Don't do that.

It doesn't help.

You can breathe out.

You can let that go.

And that doesn't make you less effective in actually helping the situation.

It makes you more effective because you're not burning up energy,

Straining at this kind of unproductive response.

Instead,

You've got more bandwidth open to look around and see,

Okay,

What can I do that will help?

Yeah,

I had my own version of that just a little while ago because as you know,

I was late to this interview because I was stuck in traffic.

And I had that moment of frustration starting to rise and then the realization like,

There's absolutely nothing that getting upset is going to do about this.

And sometimes I'm able to have that clarity of view and other times,

You know,

I'm not.

I think we're all that way sometimes.

I also particularly like you quote another writer,

C.

S.

Lewis,

In the book about this.

And I'm just going to read just a short part of it because I think it's so useful.

And he's basically talking about the slaughter and the suffering of the World War II,

Giving way to the Cold War,

And this is what he said in a letter to a friend,

One mustn't assume burdens that God does not lay upon us.

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help.

And I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help.

And then it goes on to say,

A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious.

I don't think it is.

That's so profound.

It sure is.

Thank you so much for reading that.

I just love that quote.

You know,

That was 1946.

And talk about having all the woes of the world that are,

You know,

That was way before Internet.

Every time I pick up my phone,

It's so easy to just swipe right.

And there's the headlines.

There's the latest disasters.

Yeah,

He hadn't even seen 24-hour news.

It's so staggering.

And it is one of those things that I think that good people today wrestle with.

Yes.

Which is,

I don't want to stick my head in the sand.

I'm a caring person.

There's lots of things that are happening in the world.

But I feel like this is somehow eroding me.

How can I respond to this in a wise way?

So what are some things you might say about that?

Well,

The first part is,

And again,

This is a matter of view that C.

S.

Lewis has articulated so beautifully,

That the state of worry is not itself meritorious.

The question is,

Would it help?

It doesn't.

And you know,

Kind of the reverse of that is people feel if they're not worrying,

Then they're being flaky.

They're not being conscientious.

And that's just not true.

You know,

If that were so,

Then the more worried,

The more stressed you became,

The more you would be helping the world.

And if we think of the people who have really,

Like the great,

Great political activists,

You know,

And I had all my life,

As I say,

You know,

Starting with the parents that I grew up with,

All my life I've been around political activists.

And if you think of the ones who've really changed the world,

Mahatma Gandhi,

Dr.

King,

Right,

People like that,

Nelson Mandela,

As soon as you think of them,

You know that they were not coming from a place of stress or worry or rage or any of these just,

You know,

Negative,

Negative,

Toxic emotions that so many people feel their activism has to come from.

And I know that people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Dr.

King,

They were coming from a place of great silence inside and really from a place of great love inside.

And I think that it's no accident that they're the ones whose influence continues to affect the world.

Exactly.

I often think of Dr.

Stephen Covey wrote a book,

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,

Which I think is a masterwork.

It gets classified as a business book,

But it's not really in any way,

Shape or form.

But he expounds this idea of circle of concern versus circle of influence.

And if you think of a big circle with a smaller circle inside of it,

The big circle is your circle of concern,

Everything you're concerned about.

And the smaller circle is the things you can actually do something about.

And his point is the more time that you spend in your circle of concern,

Your circle of influence actually shrinks.

And the more time that you spend in your circle of influence,

The more it grows.

And it speaks to this exact same point,

Which is that if I spend all of my time worrying or being angry or railing at the television or all of that,

Then that dissipates the energy that I can put into my circle of influence,

Which is the place that I can actually make a positive change in the world.

Right.

Absolutely.

So,

You know,

Job one is you have to take care of yourself and,

You know,

You need to have the clarity and the balance and the groundedness and the genuine compassion to help others.

Otherwise you're not going to be making things better.

You're going to be making things worse.

It seems like there's been a tension,

And this has existed in lots of people for many years between how much of their time needs to be spent in contemplation versus in action,

You know,

In activism.

And again,

To your point,

Looking at someone like Gandhi,

Who I don't remember the exact numbers,

But apparently spent several hours a day off on his own in prayer.

So I think it's one of those tensions that runs through people in the modern world who are really trying to live a good life is how do I balance those two elements?

Right.

Now,

That really brings things into my wheelhouse,

Which is that I've functioned as a meditation teacher since,

Oh my,

Since 1970 now.

And I've had the incredible opportunity to teach all over the country and in a few other countries and all different kinds of people.

I've worked for years with kids at a top,

Top prep school.

I've worked with kids at Ivy League colleges.

I've worked with prisoners and maximum security and with corporate executives and creative artists.

So I've had the great opportunity to find out what works and to find out how to share the skills of meditation in a way that practical people living in the actual world,

Not living in a storybook about India in the middle ages,

But living in America in 2018,

How can actual people integrate meditative practice into their lives in a way that they really can do it and really will do it and that it's really effective.

Now,

The key that I've been fortunate enough to learn from my own teachers is to take a natural approach to meditation.

I wrote a book actually with the title Natural Meditation.

Basically when people hear the word meditation,

They think of trying to control the mind.

When I meet someone at a party,

They say,

What do you do?

I'm a meditation teacher.

They say,

Oh,

I tried to meditate,

But it was so hard.

I couldn't concentrate.

I couldn't clear my mind.

I couldn't make the thoughts stop coming.

And that's the really kind of most widespread conception,

I would say misconception about what meditation is,

That you're trying to control the mind.

Now here's the problem with that approach,

And there's no way around this problem if you take that approach,

Which is that any effort to create a non-agitated state of mind is itself a form of agitation.

Okay,

I'm going to try real hard to just be.

It's a contradiction in terms.

So the approach in natural meditation is we start by noticing how the mind naturally works all the time.

And what the mind naturally is doing all the time is seeking happiness.

It's seeking fulfillment.

It's seeking that moment after you drink the tea and you say,

Ah,

And you go through whatever you need to go through.

You buy the tea bags and you boil the water and you pour the water in the kettle,

All that.

And you end up getting to that moment of saying,

Ah,

And everything else is a means to that end.

Okay,

And it's because we're built that way.

The mind is seeking that sense of ah,

That sense of just okayness,

Nothing else that needs to be done for me to just bask in this moment.

The mind is seeking that all the time.

Now the good news,

As all the sages,

Whether it's the Buddha or Jesus or Shankara or Lao-tzu or Socrates,

The Baal Shem Tov,

All the sages in their different language say one way or another that there is an ah that never ends,

That's not dependent on outer circumstances.

And it's your own inmost core of being.

So all we need to do is get the mind turned,

Just a little bit turned in that direction,

And let go of all our effort,

And then the mind's natural gravitation toward that happiness,

Toward that peace and that silence,

That gravity just pulls us within.

So when I lead meditation,

And I do this in workshops all over the country,

And also I have a,

Actually we have a group that meets here in Santa Monica usually every other Tuesday night and now we broadcast that live on YouTube.

That'll be tonight on YouTube actually.

So what I do is simply I gently guide people,

Show them how to let go of effort,

And then gravity takes over.

Now when you practice in that way,

It doesn't take a whole lot of time out of your day.

This is coming back to your presenting question here.

When people think,

And you'll hear this a lot from people,

Oh yeah,

Meditation's really changed my life,

But you have to practice for two hours a day.

Now the reason you hear that is that the way most people practice meditation,

Trying to concentrate,

Trying to control the mind,

That's very strenuous.

It takes a lot of effort.

So they're sitting there for an hour and 45 minutes,

Beating their head against the wall,

So to speak,

And then finally they get so tired,

The mind gets so exhausted trying to do this unnatural act of concentration that finally the mind gives up and it finally just sinks and then that last 15 minutes is just ah,

There it is.

So what fortunately I've learned from my teachers is how to skip the first hour and 45 minutes,

Go straight to the just letting go and sinking part.

And that's how I teach meditation.

What I thought was interesting about your meditation and knowing a little bit about your past and your teachers is that the style of meditation you describe,

The natural meditation,

Right,

Sounds very much like something I learned from Adi Ashanti,

Like the way he recommends a meditation.

But when I first heard natural meditation,

I thought this guy might be a TM guy,

Because that's the way transcendental meditation is often described.

It's natural.

It's this natural.

And I think based on what sounds like some of your previous work,

You did do transcendental meditation.

Yes,

I learned and practiced TM and I became a TM teacher and I worked in the TM organization.

I taught probably a couple of thousand people,

TM and all over the country for several years.

So you're right,

The basic principle of effortlessness is there in TM,

But it's not exclusively there in TM.

And one of the reasons that I eventually went my own way and stopped teaching through the TM organization,

There were a number of,

And by the way,

I still have some of my best friends are TM teachers.

But I personally had to go my,

One was because they started charging,

I thought,

Too much money.

And,

You know,

The original idea was let's share this with everyone.

And secondly,

There's a tendency there to feel that TM is the only form of effortless meditation,

That we've got a monopoly on it.

And in fact,

They're right that most meditation is taught in terms of effort and concentration,

But not all.

So once I had to go my way from TM,

That really formed the direction of my search.

And I found,

Oh,

Here in within the Tibetan teachings,

There's this Tibetan teaching called Dzogchen or it goes by other names in other schools of Tibetan Buddhism,

Mahamudra or Atiyoga.

And,

Oh,

Here in certain schools of the Indian philosophical teachings of Advaita,

Here's that that vein of effortlessness of just being as well.

So what I've done is to educate myself as much as I can in those traditions and try,

Okay,

What's the essence?

What did they all have in common?

It's all this teaching of letting go of just being and again,

Being in America teaching in 2018,

I always acknowledge that my debt of gratitude to those traditions.

But we teach this in plain American,

You don't have to learn Sanskrit and you don't have to chant mantra,

Tibetan mantras or so forth to in order to practice like this.

You can if you want.

I love my saying mantras in the shower every morning.

But as I always say,

With especially with my guys that I work with in prison,

Everything's optional.

Thank you.

That was helpful.

I was just curious about that evolution for you because I could kind of see where it started.

And that's,

You know,

The term natural meditation has often been in my life.

I tried TM in in 1970,

Which sounds like about when you started teaching it,

I was just experimenting and I was amazed I could find any kind of meditation in Columbus,

Ohio in 1970.

So let's talk a little bit then about natural meditation.

I just want to read something you wrote,

And then I'm going to let you just sort of talk a little bit more about it.

But you describe it like this will be hanging out in tasklessness.

The Italians have a lovely expression for this.

I'm going to probably pronounce this because I can't speak Italian.

Dolce Farniente,

Dolce Farniente.

Okay,

Yeah.

Dolce Farniente.

And you have to you have to you have to wave your hand.

Yeah,

There you go.

Dolce Farniente.

Sweet doing nothing.

And then you also go on to make this analogy.

And I thought this was a really useful because you're saying that if you leave the mind alone,

It's going to settle by itself.

And you say think of leaves falling from a tree.

They tell the whole story.

A falling leaf will reach the ground in 100% of cases.

And then a little bit later you say,

But rather than a leaf falling to the ground,

Most people approach meditation like they're pushing a boulder up a mountain,

Fighting gravity rather than using it grunting away at whatever task they've set themselves.

And I think that's such a great way to sort of frame up the way you think about this.

And now I'm wondering if you could talk just a little bit about the practice of natural meditation.

So listeners are going to be intrigued by this,

They're going to hear,

Oh,

Wow,

That all sounds great.

I have been,

You know,

It does feel like I'm fighting my brain every step of the way.

Dean's probably onto something here.

What do I do?

Right.

And you can't teach all that in a five minute answer to a question,

But I'm wondering if you could point in the right direction.

Right.

Let me mention,

By the way,

That there is a page on my website.

My website is deanwords.

Com.

And there's a page there called Meditate Now,

Where I have guided meditation audio tracks.

And anyone can stream them for free.

And in those tracks,

It's,

You know,

10 minutes or 15 minutes.

And I'm just walking you through the thing.

I'm guiding you the same way that I guide the groups and guide my workshops.

So we're going to talk about it in principle right now,

But people can get the direct experience by going to that page on my website.

Wonderful.

And I'll link to it in our show notes for sure.

Perfect.

Thank you.

So,

Yeah,

Tasklessness.

The thing is,

If you set yourself any kind of task in meditation,

As meditation,

Then there's something you're trying to accomplish and you're creating more agitation.

By trying to create a non-agitated state of mind,

Any effort that you expend is a form of agitation.

So you wind up chasing your tail.

If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me,

Well,

I tried to meditate,

But it was hard.

You know,

What I want to tell them is,

No,

No,

No,

You tried to meditate and therefore it was hard.

What I do is I point out to people that there's a delicious,

Effortless naturalness to the way we're experiencing things right now.

Like right now,

People who are listening to this,

They're hearing the sound of my voice.

They are feeling perhaps a chair or a couch or an automobile seat under their butt.

They're seeing whatever shapes and colors are there before their eyes.

And all of this seeing and feeling and hearing happens completely automatically.

They're not expending any effort in order to have the awareness of the sounds and the smells and the tastes and all of that.

Also thoughts are there.

Also feelings are there.

And the thoughts and the feelings come and go just like sounds or shapes coming and going.

There's nothing special about them.

They're just,

You know,

In Buddhist psychology,

Thinking is considered to be the sixth sense.

So you have hearing,

Seeing,

Tasting,

Touching,

Smelling,

Thinking.

So thoughts are just objects of experience passing through the scope of our experience and the scope of the porthole of our awareness just like sounds.

There's nothing special about them.

And there's something very liberating in knowing that,

Okay,

A thought is there.

It's just like a sound being there.

It's just like the texture,

The temperature,

The air being here.

There's nothing special about it.

There's nothing I have to do about it.

It's kind of like sitting by the side of the lake and,

You know,

You see the breeze blowing the trees.

You see the ripples on the lake coming and going.

Stuff is just sloshing around and we're just sitting there letting it be.

There's nothing we need to do about it.

Now if we just sit in this easy way,

Another thing we may start to notice is that as all these things come and go within our awareness,

There's one thing that does not come and go and that's our awareness itself.

Awareness itself is like open space,

Right?

So if we have objects here,

Think of the space of the room that you're in.

If we happen to move the teacup to a different place on the table or we move our guitar from one corner of the room to another,

The objects are moving through the space but the space is not affected.

Space is always open.

It's always free.

It's always space.

So our awareness is like space and all the different experiences that we have,

All the things we're aware of are like the different objects that are sitting in the space or moving through the space.

The space has plenty of room for everything and space is not affected by anything.

If I move the teacup to the other side of the table,

It doesn't damage the space.

It doesn't improve the space.

So in this way,

We can start to notice our awareness itself and go,

Okay,

I can just rest in this awareness.

I can just rest in this openness.

I can just rest in this natural spaciousness and let everything come and go within this space in its own natural frictionless way and know that I have no role in it.

I'm just the observer.

I'm just the witness.

Really,

I am the space because what is that?

That's the awareness.

I'm the awareness that's aware of all this stuff and just remain like open space.

Just allow spaciousness to be there and whatever is there coming and going within it,

Let it come and go within it.

And I've actually done some practices very similar to what you're describing and was startled by the fact that actually some of the time for sure there was a true settling.

I was like,

Holy mackerel,

I'm just leaving my brain alone.

Yes.

Yes.

You did not do anything to make settling happen.

There's nothing you can do to make settling happen because any effort is going to be non-settling.

In fact,

Often it sneaks up on people when you lead them in this natural way.

It sneaks up on them so naturally and kind of organically and incrementally that when I ring the little bell to signal the end of the meditation,

People go,

They may startle a little and I tell them take the time opening your eyes and then they raise their hands and go,

Boy,

How long was that?

And often they have no idea.

Was it five minutes?

Was it an hour?

And that's because you've just settled deeply into a place which is really where there's no time,

There's no space,

There's no cause and effect.

You're truly off the grid.

You're truly out of the matrix.

As people practicing in this way,

You may be practicing at home and feel,

Nothing's really going on here.

I'm kind of wasting my time.

And then suddenly the phone rings,

You forgot to turn your phone off or the cat jumps in your lap and you go,

No,

No,

No,

No.

I don't want to come out of this right now.

I guess I really am settled.

So,

Let's talk about the times that that is not the experience.

So,

You know,

I love that idea of that thinking is a sixth sense because I do really think that is,

I think it's true and I think it's a great way to look at it.

However,

For a lot of us,

It's as if like all our other senses are blind or deaf or whatever they are.

And so our sixth sense is so hyperdeveloped.

That thinking sense is what dominates.

And again,

I know you're going to object to the word effort,

But that if we don't work on a redirection,

Often we sit right in there.

And sometimes that what I think about with the open space,

Right,

That awareness is our open space and that we can rest in that awareness and that these things come and go.

And you made the analogy of in the room,

Like if I've got this teacup here and I move it over there.

Sometimes it seems like thoughts aren't a teacup that they are the size of the room itself.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Or it's a tyrannosaurus wreck stomping through the room.

And so to your point,

I think it can't be stressed enough that thought is not going away.

Right?

That's what our brains do.

And it doesn't,

Right.

And thought doesn't have to go away.

Just as the mind,

The eye doesn't have to stop seeing colors and the ear doesn't have to stop hearing sounds.

The mind does not have to stop entertaining thoughts.

I mean,

Do you think that the Buddha had to say,

Oh,

No,

I'm seeing colors in this room.

I got to close my eyes in order for me to enjoy my Buddha hood.

No,

It's it's it's compatible with everything,

You know.

But in giving meditation instruction,

I don't tell people,

OK,

Just don't do anything.

You're absolutely right.

When we're in that situation where it's just OK,

We notice things are just easily coming and going,

Then then fine.

There's nothing we have to do.

Just rest is that open space.

Now when the we the when whatever's going on,

The thoughts or the feelings,

Whatever's going on seems so intense or so engaging.

It seems like the Tyrannosaurus Rex rampaging through the room.

Then there's one more instruction.

First of all,

A couple of things not to do.

The thing that what what most people will try to do at that point is find some way to slay the Tyrannosaurus.

You can't if he's bigger than you or or else run away from the Tyrannosaurus.

You can't.

He will outrun you.

OK,

So here's the third thing.

The third way is just when you feel you're you're resisting something or you're deeply engaged with something or you're struggling with something,

A thought,

A feeling,

Whatever it is in meditation,

Simply this.

Relax your grip.

Relax your grip on it and then relax back into yourself.

Relax back into that open space of awareness and then don't worry about whether it continues to be there or not,

Because no matter how big or intense or troubling whatever the thought or the emotion is,

It can't do anything to you unless you're gripping it.

We think it's gripping us.

We think,

Oh,

The Tyrannosaurus is gripping me.

If you experiment around a little bit with this,

You'll find and this is a life changing discovery.

It has no power to grip you.

Only you grip it,

And once you realize it's you gripping it,

Then you realize you have the power to relax your grip.

I used to say let go and you hear that a lot in the meditation world,

In the spiritual world.

Just let go.

Just let go.

That's valid,

But it gets misunderstood.

I don't say let go anymore because people hear let go and they think,

Oh,

The thing has to go away.

Let's say I'm trying to let go,

But it keeps being there.

That's not letting go.

It's like requiring it to go away,

Which is a form of holding on.

What you do is,

Like right now I'm taking a ballpoint pen.

I'm gripping it hard.

This is me.

This is my mind in meditation where I'm starting to engage with this thing,

Struggling with it or resisting it or whatever it is.

Now,

If I just relax my grip,

It doesn't matter that it's still there because now my hand is open to the whole space of the room.

In fact,

Since I've relaxed my grip,

Eventually the thing's going to fall away of its own accord,

But that's none of my business.

It doesn't matter whether it falls away later or sooner.

I love that.

Relax your grip,

Recognizing that feelings might not be gripping us.

We're gripping them.

I think that let it go,

The way I've learned to think about it is let it be.

Because the let it go sort of assumes,

To your point,

Like I remember early I was in AA for a number of years and that was such a big thing early on in my recovery.

Let it go,

Let it go.

You just got to let it go.

And so I would try and let it go and it wouldn't go anywhere.

And I would think I'm failing.

I'm failing.

And I just realized like it was just,

I can't control whether it goes or doesn't go.

I can just control my relationship to it or my gripping or not gripping of it.

There's a related principle and actually I have a chapter about this in the book titled Relax at the Moment of Contact.

And this came out of,

This is I think a wonderful story really.

Years ago I was practicing Aikido.

It's a beautiful,

Very graceful martial art.

It's a non-fighting,

Non-conflictive Japanese martial art where when the other person attacks you,

You join the direction of the attack and you go,

Okay,

You want to rush in this direction toward me?

I'll just help you fly across the room.

I'll just help you keep going.

And I was in the dojo one day.

I was practicing for my next promotion test and the particular thing I was practicing is where three guys,

One after another,

All attacked me and tried to tackle me and I'm supposed to be just helping usher them across the mat.

And instead I kept winding up grappling with them and then the first one would pull me down and the other two would pile on top of me.

It was a complete mess.

I was getting more and more frustrated and got up,

Dusted myself off of getting ready to do this again and suddenly I hear the voice of my instructor.

He's across the room and he calls out,

Dean,

Relax at the moment of contact.

And it came as a surprise to me because I was so caught up in tensing that I didn't realize I was tensing.

There's a catch-22 there.

That's why sometimes you need outside intervention.

In this case,

I needed the teacher to point that out to me.

So the next time the guy rushed me,

Instead of tensing up and my shoulders rising up toward my ears and my gut tightening up,

Instead I relaxed and I did exactly the same thing with pivoting my hips and using my arms as I had before.

See now it worked.

Whee!

The guy just went flying across the room and the next guy and the next guy.

Now most people are never going to practice Aikido in their lives,

But the real Aikido is life.

The stuff that's coming toward you can be whatever it is that makes you fearful,

Whether you're afraid of flying or afraid of public speaking or afraid of asking that nice attractive person out on a date or the thing coming at you could be rage at the driver on the road that's cut you off or it could be if you have a problem with drink or with drugs or anything,

Any addictive cravings when that craving is coming toward you that rather than do what we've done before which is just automatically tense up when we have that encounter,

Do the opposite.

Very deliberately relax at the moment of contact.

Just let the thing go past you.

And it's so simple but it's really powerful.

Yeah,

That is such a great story that you tell and that's such a great catchphrase,

Relax at the moment of contact.

You describe another version of that in your own life which I've experienced often.

You say I once spent a winter in southeast Iowa and I will say I've spent an entire lifetime of winters in Ohio but that idea of we get cold and we just tense up,

Our shoulders are up,

Our whole body's tight,

We're just clenched against it.

For me I just found when I just relaxed into it and stopped the resistance of it in such a way,

The experience of it changes.

I'm still cold but I'm not miserable in the same way and I thought that was another example that you used that I've certainly experienced in my own life.

So interesting the way you put that.

Okay,

I'm cold but I'm not miserable and that recalls a saying that you've probably heard which is pain is mandatory,

Suffering is optional.

Yeah,

We interviewed Shinzen Young on the show who you probably have at least heard of through your meditation travels but he wrote out this equation,

Suffering equals pain times resistance and has lived with me just constantly and it's a lesson I learn over and over and over again is that yes,

I have back pain and sometimes it's better,

Sometimes it's worse but it's always worse when I am resisting it,

When I am really fighting it,

It shouldn't be here,

It shouldn't be this way.

I find that non-resistance is and it really gets to the heart of your meditation method,

It's the non-resistance of what's happening in the moment.

Just knowing that whatever is happening in the moment is here,

There's nothing.

I once saw what I felt was the perfect complete meditation instruction on the side of a carton of Tropicana orange juice.

It said nothing added,

Nothing taken away,

Not from concentrate.

That's great.

Well,

That is a great place for us to wrap up because we are out of time.

You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation and we're going to talk about,

You mentioned the idea of on roads to meditation,

Ways to sort of go into meditation and boy that has been something over the last year that has fundamentally changed my meditation practice is having some of those and you've got some great ones.

So we're going to discuss those.

I'll have links as we mentioned in the show notes to your book,

To your homepage,

All that but I've had a great time talking with you.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you.

It's really been great.

All right.

Thank you.

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